Author Topic: Of Fiascoes and Sycophants  (Read 3803 times)

Joe Carillo

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Of Fiascoes and Sycophants
« on: December 20, 2016, 08:38:44 AM »
Of Fiascoes and Sycophants
By Jose A. Carillo

In old Italy the glassblowers took such great pride in their craft of making Venetian glass. It had to be just perfect, with not the tiniest scratch or blemish that a finicky customer could conceivably quibble about. So when they saw the slightest flaw in the forming glass they routinely turned the whole thing into a common flask—a fiasco, they called it in Italian, and “prasko” to us Filipinos, fit only for lesser liquids like “toyo,” “suka,” and “sinkwentang ga-as.” There were no ifs and buts about glass that didn’t make the grade, and in time “fiasco” came to mean something that had gone badly wrong, an ignominious result, or—in a dramatic or musical performance—a ludicrous or humiliating failure. In our coarse Tagalog, we would merrily term it “palpak.”




In the Philippines we have at this time an embarrassing share of fiascoes, and the bad thing about it is that we are not even making a common flask of them. But to me the worse fiasco is our handling of Malaysia’s deportation of illegal Filipino workers in Sabah. It is a political and diplomatic disaster that could easily have been avoided if we just looked at the facts for at least five minutes, and if certain sectors of the media—TV and radio broadcast, in particular—had been more circumspect and less uninformed and, in some cases, not totally deluded about the issue.

I will explain and put this strong statement in perspective in a little while, but first let me introduce another English word that comes to mind in a potentially dangerous situation like this. The Greek historian Plutarch had recorded that in ancient Athens, it was illegal for anyone to export figs out of the city-state. You probably all know what a fig is. It is a soft pear-shaped fruit with many seeds, and the Athenians loved it fresh or dried. The people who lived outside the city-state, of course, also wanted a piece or two of the figs. There was thus a healthy export-import demand for it, so the law against its trade was largely ignored. All was well with the Athenian world and its neighbors.

But the problem was that even in those days, there were people who would curry favor from the authorities by informing on the benign violators. They took the role of the “informers of the fig trade,” the sukophantes in Greek, sukon for “fig” + phaino for “show.” Soon the sukophantes earned a tawdry reputation for being servile flatterers and toadies, people who would stop at nothing to win the approval of someone high up. The English word “sycophant” evolved from that word, and I find it so apropos to describe some sectors of our media in their journalistic treatment of the Sabah deportations.

I sincerely think they deserve this description. In fact, they have not only made sycophants of themselves, but have turned their journalistic reporting into monumental fiascoes as well. For many days and nights now, they have been toadying to the public about what it wanted to hear about the issue regardless of the facts. In their frenzy for media ratings (1) they have fallen and continue to fall on one another in ludicrous forms of showmanship, (2) they continue to gleefully betray and flaunt their lack of basic research and understanding of the issue, (3) they have been trying their damnedest best to incite discord and even war among the protagonists, and (4) they have been deliberately fanning public hatred and hysteria through false claims and rank sloganeering.

Consider this: In the morning TV talk shows, three or four hosts who are obviously clueless about the Sabah deportation issue merrily blabber away about it. Their first order of the day is to invite and incite telephone callers to give on the air their obviously uninformed, often incendiary opinions about the issue. Who was that sage journalist who said that one of the tragedies of broadcast media is their power to purvey and give credence to totally uninformed opinion? So sorry, sir, now they are doing it with even greater sophistication. They now actually tabulate the calls and egg on audiences to gamely balance their bets or up their ante through text or landline call. And then, after rousing their audiences to fever pitch, they now hint at war by wagging elaborate charts of the comparative military mights of the Philippines and Sabah! Such are the depths that our TV journalism has fallen into, and the bloom of the muck below is nowhere stronger, I think, than in the Sabah deportation issue.

The TV and radio sycophants are near unanimous on one thing: the Malaysians are evil and heartless in deporting the Filipino migrants from Sabah. They have cruelly violated basic human rights and must be condemned and opposed in the strongest. But what are the facts? Malaysia has actually, if surreptitiously, welcomed and even assimilated hundreds of desirable Filipinos who fit their grand design for progress. It has been doing so in the same manner that the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Arab Emirates have welcomed and embraced our teeming labor diaspora. The difference is that these latter countries can, by virtue of geography, be very selective about the people they take in. In the case of Sabah, however, there is no way to stem the tide of illegals and undocumented aliens—mostly from Mindanao—that wash into its shores day and night. Its nearness and religious affinity to most of these migrants prevent it from doing so. But now it has filled itself to the brim, not only with our good people but also with our cretins, our derelicts, and our criminals. This, to me, is the real issue in this whole fiasco, and I wish that our broadcasters would now take a few moments to ponder that fact.


I close with the thought that if we continue to revel and enjoy being conned by the sycophants in media into becoming a part of their act, then we have no right to protest to God in our churches and mosques why is it that the Philippines does not progress and prosper, but simply move on from one monumental fiasco to the next. (circa 2002-2003)

This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times in 2002-2003 and subsequently appeared in his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language. Copyright © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.
« Last Edit: December 20, 2017, 10:03:23 AM by Joe Carillo »